The hope of gaining the crown was not the result of a premeditated plan in the minds of the restless Guises. Nothing warranted such a hope or such a plan. Circumstances alone inspired their audacity. The two cardinals and the two Balafres were four ambitious minds, superior in talents to all the other politicians who surrounded them. This family was never really brought low except by Henri IV.; a factionist himself, trained in the great school of which Catherine and the Guises were masters,--by whose lessons he had profited but too well.
At this moment the two brothers, the duke and cardinal, were the arbiters of the greatest revolution attempted in Europe since that of Henry VIII. in England, which was the direct consequence of the invention of printing. Adversaries to the Reformation, they meant to stifle it, power being in their hands. But their opponent, Calvin, though less famous than Luther, was far the stronger of the two.
Calvin saw government where Luther saw dogma only. While the stout beer-drinker and amorous German fought with the devil and flung an inkbottle at his head, the man from Picardy, a sickly celibate, made plans of campaign, directed battles, armed princes, and roused whole peoples by sowing republican doctrines in the hearts of the burghers--recouping his continual defeats in the field by fresh progress in the mind of the nations.
The Cardinal de Lorraine and the Duc de Guise, like Philip the Second and the Duke of Alba, knew where and when the monarchy was threatened, and how close the alliance ought to be between Catholicism and Royalty. Charles the Fifth, drunk with the wine of Charlemagne's cup, believing too blindly in the strength of his monarchy, and confident of sharing the world with Suleiman, did not at first feel the blow at his head; but no sooner had Cardinal Granvelle made him aware of the extent of the wound than he abdicated. The Guises had but one scheme, --that of annihilating heresy at a single blow. This blow they were now to attempt, for the first time, to strike at Amboise; failing there they tried it again, twelve years later, at the Saint-Bartholomew,--on the latter occasion in conjunction with Catherine de'
Medici, enlightened by that time by the flames of a twelve years' war, enlightened above all by the significant word "republic," uttered later and printed by the writers of the Reformation, but already foreseen (as we have said before) by Lecamus, that type of the Parisian bourgeoisie.
The two Guises, now on the point of striking a murderous blow at the heart of the French nobility, in order to separate it once for all from a religious party whose triumph would be its ruin, still stood together on the terrace, concerting as to the best means of revealing their coup-d'Etat to the king, while Catherine was talking with her counsellors.
"Jeanne d'Albret knew what she was about when she declared herself protectress of the Huguenots! She has a battering-ram in the Reformation, and she knows how to use it," said the duke, who fathomed the deep designs of the Queen of Navarre, one of the great minds of the century.
"Theodore de Beze is now at Nerac," remarked the cardinal, "after first going to Geneva to take Calvin's orders.""What men these burghers know how to find!" exclaimed the duke.
"Ah! we have none on our side of the quality of La Renaudie!" cried the cardinal. "He is a true Catiline.""Such men always act for their own interests," replied the duke.
"Didn't I fathom La Renaudie? I loaded him with favors; I helped him to escape when he was condemned by the parliament of Bourgogne; Ibrought him back from exile by obtaining a revision of his sentence; Iintended to do far more for him; and all the while he was plotting a diabolical conspiracy against us! That rascal has united the Protestants of Germany with the heretics of France by reconciling the differences that grew up between the dogmas of Luther and those of Calvin. He has brought the discontented great seigneurs into the party of the Reformation without obliging them to abjure Catholicism openly.
For the last year he has had thirty captains under him! He is everywhere at once,--at Lyon, in Languedoc, at Nantes! It was he who drew up those minutes of a consultation which were hawked about all Germany, in which the theologians declared that force might be resorted to in order to withdraw the king from our rule and tutelage;the paper is now being circulated from town to town. Wherever we look for him we never find him! And yet I have never done him anything but good! It comes to this, that we must now either thrash him like a dog, or try to throw him a golden bridge by which he will cross into our camp.""Bretagne, Languedoc, in fact the whole kingdom is in league to deal us a mortal blow," said the cardinal. "After the fete was over yesterday I spent the rest of the night in reading the reports sent me by the monks; in which I found that the only persons who have compromised themselves are poor gentlemen, artisans, as to whom it doesn't signify whether you hang them or let them live. The Colignys and Condes do not show their hand as yet, though they hold the threads of the whole conspiracy.""Yes," replied the duke, "and, therefore, as soon as that lawyer Avenelles sold the secret of the plot, I told Braguelonne to let the conspirators carry it out. They have no suspicion that we know it;they are so sure of surprising us that the leaders may possibly show themselves then. My advice is to allow ourselves to be beaten for forty-eight hours.""Half an hour would be too much," cried the cardinal, alarmed.
"So this is your courage, is it?" retorted the Balafre.
